Recommendation 19

The Department told us that in order to get money to where it thought it was needed during the COVID-19 pandemic it deliberately loosened controls and thereby took on a lot of additional risk spending money without prior approval.35 It acknowledged that its controls and processes were inadequate for the post-pandemic environment and need to be reset. We questioned the Department on what changes it had made to its processes so that this does not happen again. The Department told us that it had launched a financial reset programme to get it and the NHS back to normal financial management. It said this programme would review systems and processes; capabilities and capacity; governance and accountability arrangements. It said “very strict processes” had been reintroduced to ensure approval was received before public money had been committed.36 However, its pre-pandemic processes failed to prevent unauthorised spending. In 2019–20 the value of unapproved special payments across the Departmental Group was estimated as £18 million.37